Ecosystem restoration

The approaches developed by IIS aim to assist the planning and implementation of vegetation recovery projects, exploring synergies and trade-offs between biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation and costs, under a variety of scenarios.

Economic Analysis

We seek to strengthen and defend the basic principles of balance between the economy and the environment, favoring research, planning and management in public and private fields, linked to the relationship between ecological, social and economic systems, in order to improve social well-being.

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Biodiversity-mediated effects on ecosystem functioning depend on the type and intensity of environmental disturbances

Environmental disturbances affect ecosystem functioning through changes in organ­isms’ metabolism (direct effect) and biodiversity loss (indirect or biodiversity-mediated effect). It is still a challenge to separate direct and biodiversity-mediated effects of envi­ronmental changes on ecosystem functioning due to the difficulties in isolating ‘true’ biodiversity loss effects. Furthermore, it is still unclear whether biodiversity-mediated effects are as important as direct effects. In this study, was performed an experiment in artificial microcosms to disentangle biodiversity-mediated and direct effects of two major environmental disturbances on the functioning of aquatic ecosystems: increases in temperature and salinity.

The ecosystem function analyzed was the microalgae pre­dation by the zooplankton community (zooplankton grazing rates) and the results os the study suggest that disturbances can affect the functioning of aquatic environments through a set of complex biological mechanisms that balance direct and biodiversity-mediated effects. We concluded that the relative importance of biodiversity-mediated effects depends on the type and intensity of the disturbance.

Biodiversity-mediated effects on ecosystem functioning depend on the type and intensity of environmental disturbances